Dan Penny, Head of Insights at Nature Publishing Group and Palgrave Macmillan, shares findings from the recent Author Insights Survey. The survey data is openly available and offers an extensive look into researcher perceptions and understandings of academic publishing. Few researchers are now unaware of open access. But perceptions of quality still remain a significant barrier to further OA involvement.

From Chinese neuroscientists to British sociologists, academics are at the heart of research publishing. Researchers want publishers to understand their (often very different) needs, and this is important to publishers too. Most publishers conduct quantitative and qualitative research for this purpose, but to our knowledge Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Palgrave Macmillan are the only ones to make the data open access for anyone to examine and interpret.

Our Author Insights Survey 2015 is the latest iteration of a survey that was originally carried out for internal research purposes. This year, the data includes responses from 22,000 academics, 3,023 of which work in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). For the second year running, the anonymised data from this survey is available on Figshare under a CC BY license, in order to achieve greater understanding between authors, funders and publishers.

Some of our main findings included:

The four most important factors for author when choosing where to publish were the reputation of a journal, the relevance of journal content, the quality of peer review and journal readership.

Authors in the HSS disciplines placed more importance on journal readership than Impact Factor. The term ‘author readership’ needs further clarification and investigation, however – does it mean that an author is looking for a journal with a specific and narrow readership, or for a broad, multidisciplinary set of readers? We are aiming to follow up on this.

Another factor that was considered of some importance was the reputation of the publisher. This was a surprise, as anecdotally it’s often held that authors don’t even know who the journal publisher is – it’s supposed to be the journal brand that’s important. HSS authors are sometimes thought more sensitive to publisher brands because they are what count for book publishing. For the first time in this survey, we also asked how academics judge reputation. The consistency of quality, and being seen as the best place to publish research, were some of the most popular responses.

A decreasing number of authors are concerned about perceptions of the quality of open access publications:

In 2014, 54% of HSS academics said that they were “concerned about the perceptions of the quality of OA publications.” But this year, only 41% did so. There was a similar drop in the sciences, where open access has been a popular business model for longer; from 40% in 2014 to 27% in 2015.

The results also show that there are now very few researchers unaware of open access – this wouldn’t have been the case just a few years ago. In HSS, since 2014, the percentage of authors who had not published OA because they were unaware of the model has now dropped from 9% to 7%, the same proportion as in the natural sciences.

On the other hand, open access clearly still has an image problem, as perceptions of quality are still the no.1 reason for not publishing OA, and 58% of HSS academics still aren’t publishing via open access models. Looking at the demographics, this concern is greatest in North America, and in more senior researchers.

We see quite a big difference in reported OA publication between HSS disciplines.

47% of journal authors in education research reported publishing an OA paper in the last 3 years, the highest proportion of OA for the HSS disciplines where we received more than 100 responses. By contrast, only 29% of politics authors reported publishing OA.

Compared to 2014, there was also a great deal of variance in how much OA publication has grown. Economics saw an increase of 7% year on year in authors publishing via OA, whereas fewer culture and media studies authors reported publishing OA in 2015 than did in 2014.

An area where HSS authors differed from natural science authors was in the audience they said they wanted to be aware of their published research.

It is unsurprising that HSS authors were more likely to say that practitioners (e.g. medics, criminologists) were an important audience – around 40% said that they were one of the main groups they wanted their research to inform. In comparison, only 22% of life scientists said the same.

In addition, around a third of scientists in each of the physical sciences, biology, medicine and earth science all said that funders were also an important audience for their research, whereas only 14% of HSS authors said this. This could reflect the role that funders have in the social sciences – in general, for each individual author, the significance of a particular funder is somewhat lower than in the natural sciences.

We’re keen to see other interpretations of the data, and hope it will become a useful resource for those interested in the changing perceptions of scholarly communications.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Impact of Social Science blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please review our Comments Policy if you have any concerns on posting a comment below.

[…] article by Dan Penny originally appeared on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog as “Author survey data reveals changing perceptions of scholarly communication and wider participatio… and is reposted under the Creative Commons license (CC BY […]

Hi Dan,
Thanks for sharing these findings – really interesting. At IDS, we are re-launching our flaghship social science journal the IDS Bulletin, as a gold open access journal, next year. Our contract with Wiley Blackwell was drawing to an end, and all our other publications series are currently open access, so, what with our 50th coming up next too, it was an opportune moment. We are currently running a survey (https://idsbulletin.typeform.com/to/af8DVo) aimed at both readers and non-readers of the IDS Bulletin to get a sense of how/when/why the might read the journal, but we’ve also included a series of statements trying to gauge perceptions/attitudes towards Open Access.Some of these were inspired by the Frass, W. Cross, J. and Gardner, V. (2014) Taylor & Francis Open Access Survey. (can;t provide you with the link as the one I originally used is now a broken link) – so it’s good to see a small body of work building up around these questions. I would be happy to share our own results, although there is no chance we will get as big a sample as you had (!). Thanks again for sharing, best wishes, Emilie (Institute of Development Studies)

[…] about the survey in the London School of Economics and Political science’s Impact of Social Science blog. Dan Penny, head of insights at Nature Publishing Group, observed that “in 2014, 54 percent of […]

[…] about the survey in the London School of Economics and Political science’s Impact of Social Science blog, Dan Penny, head of insights at Nature Publishing Group, observed that “in 2014, 54 percent of […]

[…] with collaborators from outside of academia is a good idea. A parallel trend appeared in our Author Insights 2015 survey conducted with Nature Publishing Group, where 40% of authors in the humanities and social sciences […]

[…] A recently-released survey suggests that scholars in the humanities and social sciences are increasingly open to open access publishing. Ironically, the survey was done by Nature and Palgrave, publishers of expensive books and journals. Or maybe it’s not ironic – it’s an indicator that open access is the future, and even for-profit publishers know it. Fittingly, the survey data has been released on Figshare under a Creative Commons license so you can do your own analysis. […]